Marie Quéau from the series Gojira

I have just done a short guest post over on the fototazo blog. fototazo has asked a group of 50 curators, gallery owners, blog writers, photographers, academics and others actively engaged in photography to pick two photographers that deserve (more) recognition – the underknown, the under-respected as well as not-appreciated-enough favorites. For my guest post, I selected Marie Quéau and Erik van der Weijde. Check out the post here and look out for an interview with Marie Quéau, coming up soon on eyecurious.

Linus Bill / Erik van der Weijde: Linus’ family in Switzerland and Erik's family in Brazil.

Related posts:

1. Book of the Week #2: Erik Van der Weijde / Der Baum
2. Guest ‘curator’ on Bite! magazine
3. Picture this!

The Butterfly Dream

I’ve just come back from a ridiculously short trip to Australia for the opening of Eikoh Hosoe: Theatre of Memory at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. This is Hosoe’s first solo show in Australia and his first trip there. In addition to having the master himself present, he came accompanied by Yoshito Ohno, the butoh dancer and son of Kazuo Ohno, the co-founder of butoh who passed away last year at the age of 103. Here’s a quick behind the scenes glimpse at the opening week of the show.

Eikoh Hosoe

Eikoh Hosoe with his portrait of Yukio Mishima from the Barakei series

Yoshito Ohno performed at the opening of the exhibition. You can see a video of one part of the performance here. There’s also another video of Ohno’s puppet performance at Zen Foto in Tokyo last year (note the Elvis Presley tune which is crucial to the tone of this performance). After the opening Hosoe and Ohno gave a fantastic artist talk in the exhibition space where they spoke about how butoh developed and how Ohno and Hijikata collaborated with Hosoe over the years.

Yoshito Ohno performing with a puppet of his father at the opening

Eikoh Hosoe and Yoshito Ohno artist talk

Second edition of Barakei, designed by Tadanori Yokoo.

Beg, borrow or steal.

Related posts:

1. Interview: Eikoh Hosoe’s Butterfly Dream
2. March Madness: 1 month, 2 exhibitions
3. November Photo Madness in Paris

No related posts.

Hiromi Tsuchida

November has always been THE big photographic month in Paris, but this year is looking like it will be a record breaker. Here’s a list of some of the big events happening in Paris this month. I don’t know how I’m going to make my way to all of these, let alone blog about all of them, but hopefully I’ll manage something.

• Mois de la Photo. The month of photography kicks off today with 50 exhibitions around the city (including a contribution by yours truly, an Eikoh Hosoe exhibition at the Photo4 gallery on the left bank). This year is the Month’s 30th anniversary and the theme is the MEP collection (yawn), but there are some good exhibitions to look out for in there.
• Mois de la Photo Off. These days it seems you can’t have a festival without their being a side event and with twice as many exhibitions as the Mois de la Photo itself the ‘Off’ will be giving the main event a run for its money.
• Fotofest Paris. The good people behind Lens Culture are organising the first edition of this portfolio review event, in collaboration with the renowned Houston Fotofest (yours truly will be be making an appearance here too as a portfolio reviewer).
• Paris Photo (18-21 Nov.): One of the best attended photo art-fairs in the world, this has become a passage obligé for most of the photoworld. Expect too many people, lots of moody black and white images (this year’s spotlight is on the Central European photo scene), no natural light, too much looking over shoulders, too many parties with too many cigarettes, WAY too many photographs… and yet you wouldn’t want to miss it.
• Offprint Paris (18-21 Nov.): In parallel to Paris Photo, this will be the first edition of Paris’s very own photobook fair, which is an interesting reflection of the current growing excitement around photobooks. While we’re on the topic of photobooks there’s an interesting exhibition opening next week at La Monnaie de Paris on the photobook svengali, Gerhard Steidl, which looks like it’ll be worth a look.

If you love photography and you weren’t planning to be in Paris this November… what were you thinking?

Related posts:

1. Paris November photo madness round-up
2. Paris Photo and beyond
3. Paris Photo: crossing the finish line

As you can see from the above image, there is a steadily growing pile of books sitting in the corner of my living room. Short of actually getting around to getting some more shelving or moving flats, I have decided to at least throw a little spotlight on one book each week. These won’t be book reviews, but a brief look at a book that has been getting some page-turning action that week. Also check out eyecurious books etc. for more photobook-related posts.

Related posts:

1. Book of the Week #1: Harvey Benge / Birds
2. Book of the Week #2: Erik Van der Weijde / Der Baum
3. Book of the Week #4: Michael Wolf, Tokyo Compression

Once again, dear readers, I have to apologise for my blogging silence. But this time I have a pretty foolproof excuse (see image above).

In fairness I can’t blame my recent wedding entirely for the lack of posting as there is another happy event that has kept me busy for the other half of the summer: FOAM magazine’s annual Talent issue. I was asked to do all the Q&As with the fifteen contributing photographers, which was an excellent experience as there are never enough opportunities to sit down with photographers and ask them a bunch of questions about their work and a lot of the work featured in this issue I would most likely never have discovered otherwise. With photo-blogs I find that we too often just gravitate towards things that we take an instant liking to and too often end up overlooking interesting work that doesn’t immediately resonate with us, so being presented with a really broad cross-section of work from all different fields and styles and trying to engage with all of it is an experience that I highly recommend. As a bonus, I’m not the only blogger to feature in the issue, as I understand that Mrs Deane has also contributed a text… two virtual salmon swimming upstream into the world of the printed page. The magazine is going to be released this week so keep an eye out for it at your local photobook store. And more to the point, keep an eye out here as eyecurious gets cranked back into action.

No related posts.

Takashi Homma, Tokyo and my Daughter

Self-promo alert: I’ve just written an essay on Takashi Homma’s series, Tokyo and my Daughter, for edition 23 of FOAM Magazine on City Life. Of course this brilliant piece of writing is reason enough to buy yourself a copy, but there happens to be some other really good stuff in there too, so now you really have no excuse.

No related posts.

I will be picking one commenter at random to give away a little package of Japanese photographic goodness. This won’t be anything too fancy but it will include a few publications on different photographers. I will pick a winner on Monday 26th April (please provide your email address when commenting so I can get in touch).

Related posts:

1. Mariko Takeuchi on contemporary Japanese photography
2. Review: Japanese photobooks of the 1960s and ’70s
3. A Japanese season starts in Paris

Related posts:

1. Future of photobook creation
2. eyecurious books etc.

A few months ago, Diederik Meijer asked me to guest ‘curate’ (staying true to my post on curating, I have to use those quote marks since this is more editing than curating… but I digress) a week of Japanese photography over on Bite! magazine. It has taken far longer than I thought it would to get it all together but the week starts today with Koji Onaka’s Tokyo Candy Box, so please take the time to check it out.

Related posts:

1. Fototazo guest post